War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova · reception & legacy
1966 · Sergey Bondarchuk
How War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A state-scale event in the USSR on release, but for decades the West mostly knew Bondarchuk's epic through butchered, dubbed cuts — the 2019 Mosfilm restoration (and Criterion release) turned it into a bucket-list watch, with this Natasha-centred part frequently singled out as the emotional peak.
What's debated
The perennial fan debate: is this intimate, swooning part actually the best of the four — better even than the battle spectacle — and should the parts be logged and rated separately or only as one seven-hour whole?
Its footprint
The ballroom sequence, with its giddy, airborne camera, is the endlessly-referenced image — the shot people reach for whenever cinema's great ball scenes are ranked.
Where it stands
Canon climber: once the connoisseur's pick of the tetralogy, now a Letterboxd darling routinely called the most beautiful stretch of the whole epic.